It’s a Gongworthy Day
Rumors of Alexandr Wang's demise are not true, LeCun raises enormous seed round for his neolab, White House preps order to "weed out" Anthropic
Happy Tuesday.
The current thing in tech and business is Meta’s acquisition of Moltbook.
Today’s lineup
Archer Founder and CEO Adam Goldstein at 12:45 PM
Legora Co-Founder and CEO Max Junestrand at 1:00 PM
PADEM Media Group Founder and CEO Allan McLennan at 1:15 PM
Rhoda AI CEO Jagdeep Singh at 1:30 PM
Juicebox Co-Founder and CEO David Paffenholz at 1:40 PM
Daily Op-Ed, by Brandon Gorrell
It’s a Gongworthy Day
A lot of industry news on the timeline this morning, so we’re rounding up the most gongworthy of it all in today’s op-ed.
Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines snags multi-year partnership with Nvidia
After losing half of its six co-founders in under a year, the neolab Thinking Machines, headed by OpenAI alum Mira Murati, will get a multi-year investment from Nvidia in which it will deploy at least a gigwatt of cutting-edge chips to train AI models, per WSJ. Even though Thinking Machines has had high-profile executive departures, it’s grown its headcount from roughly 30 to 120 in about a year.
Yesterday’s rumors of Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang appear to be completely baseless
Multiple tech news aggregator accounts on X posted that Alexandr Wang, who leads Meta Superintelligence Labs, had been sidelined by Mark Zuckerberg and was on his way out of the company yesterday. Both Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth and Zuck quickly hopped into the chat to categorically deny the rumors; Zuck’s post on Threads is particularly funny for the comments on it.
Yann LeCun raises massive seed round for Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs
After leaving his 12-year post at Meta early this year, Yann LeCun started Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs to build AI that learns from physical and visual reality, rather than just language. Today he announced he’s raised a $1.03B seed — the largest-ever seed round for a European startup — at a $3.5B valuation.
AI legal startup Legora raises huge Series D
This morning the Swedish legal AI startup Legora announced a $550M Series D at a $5.5B valuation, just a year after their entry into the US market. From JC Bahr-de Stefano: “Company was started in ‘23 [and] in the YC W24 batch. They’ve raised $815.5M in the 2 years since — insane trajectory!”
AI recruiting platform Juicebox nears unicorn status with its latest raise
Big day for YC. Part of the summer ‘22 batch, the company has now raised a total of $116M after the $80M Series B, which values it at $850M, that it just announced today. The round is led by DST Global with participation from Sequoia, Coatue, and YC.
Meta acquires agent-based Reddit-style social network Moltbook
Just over a month after Moltbook, a messageboard exclusively for AI agents, took over the timeline, it’s been acquired by Meta and its founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL). The size of the deal is undisclosed, but obviously a huge outcome for a few founders who hopped on the OpenClaw trend super early. Watch our February interview with Matt Schlicht here.
Headlines
Axios: Exclusive: Meta hires duo behind Moltbook
NYT: Former Meta A.I. Chief’s Start-Up Is Valued at $3.5 Billion
Bloomberg: Ackman’s Pershing Square Seeks Up to $10 Billion in NYSE IPO
Bloomberg: Amazon Wins Court Order Blocking Perplexity’s AI Shopping Bots
Axios: Scoop: White House readies executive order to weed out Anthropic
Thinking Machines Lab and NVIDIA Announce Long-Term Gigawatt-Scale Strategic Partnership
Legora raises $550M at a $5.55B valuation
Wired: OpenAI and Google Workers File Amicus Brief in Support of Anthropic Against the US Government
Bloomberg: Google to Provide Pentagon With AI Agents for Unclassified Work
WSJ: Anthropic’s Standoff With the Pentagon Shakes Up AI Talent Race
Posts of the Day
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